HAIFA, Israel—On Oct. 7, at 6:35 a.m., the Hamas terror group began launching a rocket attack from the Gaza Strip in the southern area of Israel.
Following the barrage and the notifications sent out to alert people about a possible intrusion of terrorists into the area, the security coordinator of Ein HaBesor, a farming town located about four miles from the Gaza border, ordered the front gate to be closed and positioned all of his security team—made up of town residents, more than 60 armed men—to defend the community, Yftach Gepner, a resident of the town and eyewitness, told The Epoch Times.
Armed and Ready
A few minutes after the decision to close the town’s main gate, a group of terrorists arrived on motorcycles and in a van, carrying assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and grenades, to storm the settlement, according to Mr. Gepner, a professor at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Medicine.Because of a wave of car thefts in the town in prior months, the security team, which normally consisted of 12 members, had been expanded to 68 men to protect the town’s property, he said.
As a result, on the day of the terror attack, nearly all members of the security team were armed and at the gate and fences of the town to protect it.
“The sequence of events meant that we, with many people, managed to repel the attack,” Mr. Gepner said.
Mr. Gepner’s brother, who was armed with an M-16, was at the front gate by himself for a short while until more members of the security team arrived. He was shot in the shoulder.
After he was shot, Mr. Gepner’s brother called him and told him that he needed to be evacuated. At that moment, Mr. Gepner—a former fighter in a paratrooper reconnaissance unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—was on the other side of the town to prevent the attack, holding “a stone, because I had no weapon,” he said.
Mr. Gepner got into his car and drove to his brother’s location. He found the hole where the bullet had entered his brother’s shoulder but saw that there was no exit hole.
“That is—it could be anywhere in the body,” he said.
His brother required immediate treatment to remove it.
Mr. Gepner put his brother into his vehicle and drove through the back gate of the town, trying to make it to the main hospital in the area, the Soroka Medical Center in the city of Be'er-Sheva, about 20 miles away.
When they turned onto the main road leading to the hospital, they saw two vans, with 10 terrorists inside and outside of each van, and five motorcycles, each armed from head to toe, about 200 yards ahead of them.
“It takes me two, three seconds to realize what I’m seeing,” Mr. Gepner said, “because cognitively, it’s a scene that the brain can’t digest.”
He was backing up when suddenly two terrorists on motorcycles approached and opened fire on them.
Mr. Gepner turned his car around and escaped, with the sports mode in the Tesla he was driving allowing him to accelerate quickly and outrun the terrorists. All the while, his brother was shouting that he was being hit with more bullets.
The car filled up with smoke, and just before the battery disconnected and the car broke down, the two brothers made their way back to the town.
At this point, Mr. Gepner’s brother was injured with several gunshot wounds.
Mr. Gepner, together with a few additional armed men, evacuated his brother in an ambulance that happened to be there and that they “literally stole,” he said. Another security vehicle provided an escort.
After an hour and 45 minutes, passing in between many squads of terrorists as they traveled, they were able to transfer the wounded man to an emergency ambulance and managed to reach the hospital “at the last moment, and saved his life,” he said.
Mr. Gepner said his brother has since been discharged from the hospital, and although his situation still requires medical treatment, he’s recovering.
“He will be fine,” he said.
“I was here in the settlements that were attacked. I saw the terrorists with the green ribbons.
“[They] crossed the border—an international border—to another country, to murder, to rape, and to kill infants, children, Holocaust survivors, taking all their belongings,” he said.
“[The terrorists] came to murder our families. We could not let this happen at any cost.”
Although a few members of the security team were wounded by gunshots, Ein HaBesor didn’t lose any members of its community.
“You can hear the stories. You can see the photos, and you can watch the videos,” Mr. Gepner said, “but you cannot smell the hate of inhumanity.”
‘Complete Carnage, Unbelievable Atrocities’
Saturday, Oct. 7 was the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah—the festival celebrating the completion and restart of reading the Torah, the scripture of the Jewish faith.Dr. Shlomo Gensler, an anesthesiologist at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem who volunteers as an emergency doctor with United Hatzala—a nonprofit community-based volunteer emergency medical services organization—received a call.
He was with his wife and children when he got a call from United Hatzala asking him if he would take some calls from people who were trapped near the Gaza border.
Dr. Gensler was given the telephone number of an individual for a medical consult. It was about 9:30 a.m.
He called and spoke with a young woman whose father was missing limbs because of a grenade explosion and also had been shot multiple times.
“I asked them if they had put on a tourniquet, and they said, ‘Yes, we put on tourniquets.’ And they said he was starting to lose consciousness,” Dr. Gensler said.
He said he tried to call the army but was told: “We don’t have any control right now. We can’t do it. And we’re sorry.”
Dr. Gensler had to call the family and explain that a rescue wouldn’t be possible.
At first, he said, he was going to tell them to get in a car and just go, but then he heard machine gunfire in the background.
The family said they were in a secure room and that there would be no way to get out without protection.
Shortly afterward, United Hatzala called and asked if Dr. Gensler would be willing to head south with his intensive care jeep to start treating people.
He took an emergency medical technician and drove his vehicle to Heletz Junction, about four miles north of Sderot and about five miles from the north end of the Gaza Strip.
There was “a lot of rocket fire.”
“We were seeing the Iron Dome intercept a lot of missiles,” Dr. Gensler said.
He and the EMT put on bulletproof vests and helmets.
It was about 12:30 p.m.
“They asked us how much we were willing to go in. We wanted to see. We got there. There were a few people coming, and obviously, there were also some bodies that people were bringing as well,” Dr. Gensler said.
At the staging area, there was a logistics truck that they started offloading because they had bodies coming and needed a place to put them.
Then, they decided that they were going to go in.
After a checkpoint, they saw a group of soldiers standing over a body. What they found was a man lying facedown with multiple bullet holes and his leg deformed.
They turned over the man and saw an exit wound out of his eye.
“We realized that there was nothing we could do for him,” Dr. Gensler said.
There were bullet casings on the side of the body that still felt warm.
“So we were concerned,” he said, because it meant that the terrorists were close by.
They took the body back to the staging area and went back in.
“We did not realize ... what we would see afterward,” Dr. Gensler said. “What we saw was complete carnage, unbelievable atrocities.”
Along the road were civilian cars, with people shot, all over the place, he said.
People had been shot, and their vehicles had crashed off to the side of the roadway. Others had been trying to get out of their cars, were hanging out of vehicles, “and they weren’t alive anymore,” Dr. Gensler said.
Others had been executed in the middle of the highway.
“It was a complete carnage,” he said, “and it was quite horrible.”
They progressed south until Netivot, a city about seven miles from the Israel–Gaza border.
“I probably saw hundreds of bodies on the highway itself,” Dr. Gensler said, noting that he saw two police cars and five police officers dead.
They passed Netivot and came to a place where they began accepting a lot of seriously wounded patients.
A paramedic had been there for a few hours already.
There were a number of dead bodies of civilians by a bus stop.
The medical team started to perform triage and provide some emergency treatment.
About two to three blocks away a Hamas rocket fell near an apartment building with a large explosion, according to Dr. Gensler.
“At first, we were all ducking down, nervous about it,” he said. “But then eventually once they kept coming, we decided to keep working throughout.”
They were treating patients and trying to decide which hospital each patient would go to and which ambulance would take them.
Then they decided to go further to a town called Shuva, about four miles from the border and on the main road close to Be'eri, Nahal Oz, and Kfar Aza, a few of the hardest-hit places.
On the road, they set up a mini-hospital where they started to treat patients and triage them.
An IDF combat rescue unit, Unit 669, was willing to land its helicopters close by, so they set up a landing spot.
“We moved people over to the helicopter, the real serious ones,” Dr. Gensler said, “and anybody who needed treatment—we treated them right there, [before moving them by ambulance to the hospital].
“We kept doing this over and over, and then also the army started bringing in [wounded people] and went back in to get more.
“I saw a 90-year-old lady shot in the chest. They were shooting everyone without any mercy, no regard for anyone.”
In the middle of the night, the medical team decided to try to drive down to Be’eri, which is about three miles from the border.
“We were very close to all the fighting,” Dr. Gensler said.
“Along the way, it just reminded me of the scenes that I saw from the Holocaust. ... houses burning, cars blown up, and shrapnel all over the road.”
They also saw terrorists who had been captured, handcuffed, and blindfolded but who were “being treated nicely,” he said.
“Civilians were murdered without any regard for human life,” Dr. Gensler said. “The contrast was very stark to me.”
They joined with three other local doctors.
“We must have seen hundreds and hundreds of patients,” Dr. Gensler said. “It was hard to count.”
Throughout the night, he said, they would hear about another terror attack, with more and more terrorists crossing over the border.
“We had soldiers around us for most of the time, trying to protect us,” Dr. Gensler said. “We just kept treating [people] the whole night.”
He went home to Jerusalem the next day and slept a few hours then went back the next night.
Later, once he had gotten back to his work at the hospital, Dr. Gensler witnessed the aftereffects of the terrorist attacks, caring for civilians and soldiers who had been injured.
“Even right now, I work in the ICU, and I’ve been treating soldiers throughout,” he said. “I took people from the ICU to a hyperbaric chamber in order to try to save their limbs. ... to try to save their hands, their legs.”
